The Mandela trail.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. October - November 2024
I’d done my research on Ethiopia, lots of it. With good reason, between revolution, famine, civil war and a prolonged conflict with Eritrea, the country had experienced very little peace or stability in my lifetime.
The few months had seen an element of hope emerge though and from following other travelers on social media I knew that both Ethiopia and Eritrea were now open to intrepid travellers!
Bole international is a good, mid to large sized airport and with redevelopment currently taking place, it is set to grow to a capacity of 25 million travellers per year!
The hoardings in place to isolate the construction work are covered in images and messages promoting one Ethiopia for all Ethiopians. It's a good message and as I queued to buy Ethiopian Birr and the 60USD needed for a 90 day visa I was looking forward to experiencing this land locked country's unique mix of ancient sites, religious icons, black lions, volcanoes and a Rastafarian village!
Oh and apparently the Ark of the Covenant is kept in a church in Axum!
Ethiopia was the 5th country I’d visited. Officially. More about that in the book.
By now I had established a routine when arriving in a new country;
Get a local sim card. eSims are great in an emergency but they are costly and, in my experience, don't provide great coverage.
Get local currency and check the offers available at the airport. By shopping around you can save as much as 10 %
Open a local digital wallet if the law of the land prohibits places like Western Union from dispensing hard currency. (I’d lost my bank card in Beirut) .
Find a decent coffee shop. (Not difficult to do in Ethiopia).
Download the local language to Google translator.
Learn the basic greetings at least.
Be aware of local customs and protocols.
With this list in mind I left the terminal building, headed for the nearest smoking shelter and felt rain fall on my face for the first time in months.
I was feeling good, I offered a cigarette to the young soldier seemingly responsible for guarding the shelter. He declined and in broken English explained that it was illegal to smoke when in uniform. I later found out that members of the Ethiopian military were strongly discouraged from smoking at all.
He also gave me the time honoured sign for, slip it in my pocket without letting anyone see!
I only had about a 2km walk to my hotel in downtown Bole so, against the advice of every single person who saw me, I hitched my pack and set off. Loving every drop of rain that landed on me. I’d come from 40℃ plus Jordan so even with the humidity, at 30℃, Addis Ababa felt cool!
It took me about 30 minutes to locate my hotel, in an area described by a certain online travel site as dangerous, run by gangs.
What a lot of horseshit!
I went all over Bole and Addis itself and not once did I feel in any way threatened. Again, my basic Amharic helped with things like directions, shopping and travel advice.
Now that I think of it, I've basically spent the last 12 months in places described by the UK foreign office as being on the red list. Do not travel and yes, I’ve had a tremendous variety of guns pointed at me. By soldiers, police, private security companies and, briefly, militant Islamic fighters. Not once have I felt threatened though and the general public, civilians, have shown me nothing but friendship, kindness and love.
I’ve made this point previously and I will make it again and again.
It’s kind of the point.
Humans aren't the problem. Governments are. Corporations are. Billionaires are.
The system is the problem.
Anyway, back to Bole.
With my list completed I packed my day bag with water, bread, my power pack and a rain jacket, flagged down a Ride scooter, think Uber on LSD, and went on the wildest ‘taxi’ ride of my life.
Everyone knows that hire cars can travel on roads that you would never drive your own car on right? In the same way, Addia Ababa scooter taxis can go, well basically anywhere they want. This guy wanted to go across wasteland, through a river and got great joy from driving towards the oncoming traffic. Sometimes in the middle lane.
At one point another scooter rider drew alongside us so they could chat as we weaved between the oncoming traffic along Bole main road, helmets are a rarity, and seeing my Liverpool cap the newcomer gestured for me to transfer to his TVS scooter. While we were riding along!
My driver didn't seem to see that as a problem at all.
I, however, am a relatively intelligent, well travelled gentleman. I am not some reckless, adrenaline junky in the midst of a mid life crisis and did not feel I needed to prove my machoism to a couple of highly irresponsible scooter drivers!
We pulled up outside Garad shopping mall and by the time I’d hopped off the scooter my original driver had pulled up besides us, still laughing at the crazy misungu, a local colloquialism for whitey that I only ever heard used in jest and always accompanied by the traditional, Ethiopian double shoulder to shoulder greeting.
Let’s deal with that elephant in the room.
For most of my journey I have been the only westerner or white guy in sight. Now I don't think in terms of colour, race or religion etc. I am an anatomically modern human (AMH) and so is everybody else so that may go some way to explaining why I never thought of myself as different.
To be fair I had such a deep red / brown tan that by the time I’d got as far south as Qena in Egypt, the locals had started speaking to me in Arabic and with my shemag, headscarf / face protection, tied to protect my, at the time, shaven head from the brutal Eastern desert sun, I could easily pass as middle eastern!
Perhaps because of its adoption as a sign of solidarity with the people of Palestine, my black and white shemag caused quite a stir all across the middle east and east Africa and had led to some interesting conversations. Especially in Egypt where vendors are not allowed to sell the black, tactical shemag!
My favourite, shemag related, incident occurred in downtown Giza though, when a group of men, around my age who were sitting outside a cafe enjoying their morning shisha pipe spotted me walking on the other side of the road and called out, in unison, “Ya! Yaser Arafat!”
Usually, away from city centres, the most common reaction to my presence was a look of stunned surprise, followed by a smile or friendly nod.
My first walkabout in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa was no different. In the modern, new CBD area no one paid me a second glance. There were quite a few non Ethiopian faces in the cafes and shops. By the time I’d gone about 2km from the CBD I was attracting more than one perplexed look from passersbye and as I crossed a taxi rank, bustling with the minibuses that are found in taxi ranks all over Africa, I was approached by a tall, casually dressed man who looked to be in his mid thirties. Wearing a brightly coloured rastcap or tam on top of his piled up dreadlocks, a huge golden chain around his neck and an enormous grin he couldn’t hide his incredulity as he laughingly asked me, “hey misungu what are you doing?”
My reply of “just walking man” elicited more laughter and another question, “walking where ? There is nothing for you here.”
A few people waiting for their taxi had spotted our exchange and a small crowd was gathering to listen. Now was a good time for a smoke. I offered the concerned citizen a Malboro, lit one myself, sat down on a pile of old bricks and explained that I had no specific destination, that I had travelled all the way down from Turkey and was exploring the unseen side of Addis.
For the next five minutes Ibrahim, as he introduced himself, gave me his list of suggested dos and don'ts while in Addis. As I suspected he was the rank controller and he knew all the best coffee shops, museums, markets and brothels in town.
Another room, another elephant.
The sexual exploitation of women and gender based violence is not an African problem. It's a global problem.
In every country I have visited I have been offered the services of a prostitute.
Ethiopia though was the only country so far where I have been approached by a well dressed man in a hotel reception area and asked if I would like to choose a girl from a bunch of photographs on his phone, to be delivered to my hotel that night!
Price dependant upon requirements.
As I explained that I wasn't interested I made the conscious choice not to judge him.
For the vast majority of people in the countries I have visited, life is hard.
Fucking hard.
Fucking, fucking hard.
A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do to survive right?
A girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do to help feed her family right?
Wrong.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I cover this topic in my gonzo journalism so I won't dwell on the subject here.
To summarise though-
Addis Ababa has a serious problem with prostitution aimed at tourists and it goes on under the noses of the police. Fact. I witnessed it.
The rapid expansion of what I predict will be a white elephant, Addis corridor project, proves that there is plenty of money being invested into Ethiopia.
Read my eye witness account of the effect of the project on ordinary Ethiopians here.
Sex tourism is a global problem.
I was encouraged that I did not see the well dressed pimp at my hotel again and can only assume that the hotel staff were unaware of what he was doing up until then.
By now my belly was letting me know that it had been a few hours since breakfast and I had a taste for one of the mealies, corn on the cob, I’d passed being grilled over an open fire half an hour ago so after my new friend Ibrahim had shown me the extended, cooler, version of the shoulder bump and the small crowd had all wished me well I set off back towards the new CBD and a delicious, not quite blackened homegrown corn on the cob. Served in its leaves so you don't burn your fingers, liberally sprinkled in salt when available and today accompanied by a singing, dancing young lady who definitely appreciated the generous tip!
One of the main reasons I’d come to Addis, apart from its many historical churches, national parks and cultural artifacts, was that Nelson Mandela had a strong connection to the place.
As well as having been a guest at the city’s Ras hotel in 1962, where he was presented with a handgun sent by former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as a gift and symbol of the struggle, the man who would become the first President of post apartheid South Africa had received his military training at an army base in the city.
This would be a perfect story for the chapter of the book that I planned to dedicate to Madiba.
I knew where the Ras hotel was, my issue was that no-one seemed to know where the base was!
Everyone knew that Mandela had been trained in Addis. No-one knew where the training had taken place though.
I was mulling this over and thinking that I’d quite like a cup of exquisite, strong Ethiopian coffee when I was approached by a very tall, very skinny young man of about 16 - 18.
He introduced himself as Isaac and explained that he offered walking tours of the city. He was clearly new to this so I invited him to join me for coffee and told him to convince me that I should make use of his services.
He gave me a good spiel. He mentioned all of the churches I wanted to visit and told me I would see a genuine Michelangelo !
He told me a price that was half of what the established guides were asking and said his friend would accompany us as he knew the people in the churches who could get me into the bits that weren’t open to the public.
I’d come across this sales pitch in Egypt and to be fair, I had got inside some of the tombs and sections of Pyramids that I knew were off limits to the general public without paying thousands of USD to the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.
Yeah right!
Smile and wave.
I liked Isaac. By now I knew that he was from the Amhara region and was in Addis to complete his diploma in IT. From there he wanted to build websites. As with most rural Ethiopian students who moved to the city, Isaac receives no assistance from anyone and he and his friend were trying to raise funds to enroll in the upcoming new term.
After agreeing the details for the following day, we finished our coffee and just before the shoulder bumps, I asked Isaac if he knew the whereabouts of the camp where Mandela had been trained.
In reply, he grabbed his mobile / cell phone and said he was calling his friend and business partner James who he said “may know someone”.
Isaac promised to do some digging, James had told us that he had heard a rumour about a police training camp somewhere. This was good as it confirmed a theory I was developing about a police training college 30 km or so to the North.
By choosing the scooter I’d knocked 30 minutes off the journey into Addis. The traffic between the capital and Bole is horrendous.
It’s a car park.
A car park full of roadworks.
Unless you're a scooter rider, in which case rules of the road do not apply.
To make matters worse this was rush hour.
My driver / rider told me that he would fold in any car wing mirrors that were in his way and that it was my job to unfold them as we passed!
Fortunately we were able to go so fast on the wrong side of the road that wing mirror etiquette was the last thing on my mind.
What a rush. What a day.
I was looking forward to meeting Isaac and James the following day.
